In Iran, you get whipped 74 times for singing songs about women who choose not to cover every inch of their whorish flesh; in some US states, condemned murderers can opt to be shot to death by the state.

'This "measles" thing's a fed'ral plot,'
Says Mercy Culture's Pastor Schott:
'Don't need no stinkin' devil's dose.
Just Father Son and Holy Ghost.
Our kiddies' death means diddlysquat.'

… a pink sunrise with pink contrail. An hour ago, from the deck outside my bedroom.

Yellow, white, and purple wildflowers are everywhere.

For background, go here.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness. It’s … deeply unfair. … [At the same time, trans] people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with, as well. So, both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with … decency, … and at the same time deal with the unfairness [in athletics].”

Trump loses, and the rest of us learn not to jump to conclusions about the Supreme Court.

******************

And permit me a nyah-nyah — I’ve been telling my political friends for years that all is not lost with the Supreme Court. I’ve told them that the Supreme Court will surprise them. They have laughed at me when I said that.

That’s one for UD.

*************************

UPDATE: ‘[W]e’ll find out [in subsequent rulings] whether the Supreme Court intends to serve as a bulwark against a president who is hell-bent on asserting the unilateral power to control federal spending. If not, yesterday’s order may come to look like a momentary, ephemeral reprieve in Trump’s ongoing assault on Congress’s power of the purse.‘

Shame seems to be the big thing at the moment (“And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”) as the US regresses to Second World status, with our would-be dictator and primitive public realm.

Our emerging civic models are disease-vector cults (fringe Mennonites, the Ultraorthodox) and it’s INSANE that we keep giving zealots vaccination exemptions and education exemptions and civic existence exemptions but this is where we are. Eventually our sense of shame will disappear, and it’ll be all Ostrogoth and Visigoth and Mad Max Fury Road.

At least we’ll have plenty of guns for the incipient permanent warfare.

Is it because it’s in the news as one more federal agency under attack by the current administration?

Anyway, she gave today, and as always is thrilled that her blood pressure and hemoglobin are good to go.

George Packard’s quietly brutal takedown of Ross Douthat’s Believe defines and defends secular liberalism in an especially engaging way. His recital of the Creed (see above) is both inspiring and resolute, and he quite correctly opens the review with it, so that readers can understand right off the bat what he brings to Christian apologetics like Douthat’s. Packer makes clear that he understands, given existential panic and the tragedies of life, the emotional appeal of redemptive faith; he makes just as clear that what seem to him consoling fictions remain fictions, and thus fail to console, much less make life meaningful. We make life meaningful.

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book.

That’s nice – for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book – and it reminds us of the amusing tendency among some believers to really let nonbelievers have it.

[Douthat] repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

I wish Packer had mentioned something like Camus’ Lyrical Essays, full of lucid apprehensions of a world which is ours and ours alone.

UD‘s woods.

‘Sherry Zane is working on a co-edited book project, Divergent Morals: Cash and Contrivance. She recently co-edited Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Misuses of Reimbursement.‘

“What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen…

And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”

********************

David Brooks

Senior Lecturer Alexis Jetter has an impressive journalism background, and Dartmouth seems to have hired her off the tenure track to teach the trade. But lately she’s been a bit on the loose wig:

Jetter wrote that she had lost her temper and cursed at two male students in the WGSS departmental lounge. She alleged that the students had refused to leave the lounge when asked. 

Lots of filling in needed here. How dramatically did she lose her temper? Does ‘cursed’ mean you fucking assholes at the top of her lungs, or damn fellas wish to hell you’d leave sotto voce? What hideous behaviors warranted her response – if it was warranted? Dartmouth’s thick with pissoff-artist frat boys; was one such group staging an antifeminist intervention?

But even if it were – You don’t engage. If they’re really bothering you, you leave. Maybe you ask a colleague what you should do. Maybe you call security. A shouting match is a truly bad idea.

As for the rat-as-late-stage-capitalism-icon — oy. Again, we need to fill in a lot of blanks here, but she herself writes that the lesson was about Trump as capitalism’s noxious end stage, which again you might want to be careful… Aside from the fact that you can’t take for granted every student’s agreement that Trump’s a rat, there’s the silliness of insisting – because you wish it so – that he’s the last gasp of capitalism.

Anyway, ol’ UD can’t blame her for saying fuck it when the school began coming at her with formal grievance procedures. She wisely resigned before being subjected to that shit.

UD’s in the middle.

… on all fronts.